Leah Remini and Paul Haggis on What It’s Like to Break with Scientology

Leah Remini and Paul Haggis, the world’s most famous former Scientologists, were at the Tribeca outpost of Barnes & Noble on Wednesday night, tucked between children’s lit and a set of shelves marked “Top Picks in Christian Life.”

Remini, the King of Queens star who broke with the church in 2013, has a memoir, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, published this week by Random House, that describes her life in Scientology and the events that led to her public split. Haggis, the Oscar-winning director of Crash whose own decision to leave the religion was chronicled in Lawrence Wright’sGoing Clear, was on hand to conduct an interview pegged to the book’s release.

A crowd of about 150 people had gathered to hear the somewhat disparate pair discuss life after Scientology. No less than seven security guards roamed the perimeter, two of them at the entrance, checking attendees for the required wristbands that signified purchase of the memoir. Remini and Haggis emerged to cheers and a rising wave of iPhone cameras from the crowd. One fan shouted, “You go, Leah, you lookin’ good!,” which inspired a “Paul, you look good, too.”

“Yes, it’s correct: leaving Scientology makes you much sexier,” said Haggis, as he settled into his chair. From there, he dove in, prefacing his first question with: “Since it’s you and me, I want to get really personal.” Remini joked that she loved “watching the lawyer’s face” while she answered some of the more pressing questions from both Haggis and the audience.

When Haggis asked Remini if there was anyone she missed, she said that leaving her godchildren behind was what upset her the most, but that she was mostly disappointed in people she had considered friends who “didn’t have the integrity to stand by . . . someone who had supported them in their lives.” Haggis mentioned the pain of disconnecting with his former business manager Kevin Burke.

The conversation between the two of them was warm and relatively candid. Both Remini and Haggis seemed at ease with the crowd and with each other, peppering their conversation with self-deprecating jokes and shared eye rolls over ridiculous-sounding Scientology terms. The friendship that Haggis mentioned in a recent open letter to Remini was evident in their rapport onstage. Haggis reiterated a point he had made in his letter as the reason why he had agreed to participate in the talk: “There was only one person who did not disconnect when I left, and that was Leah.”

They touched on the slow recovery after leaving the church—Remini has been out for two years, Haggis for at least six—and Haggis mentioned the slow process of learning that “some of the things you took for granted as true just aren’t.” He said he still wakes up some days and says to himself, of certain past beliefs, “Well, that’s bullshit.”

Speaking about those in Hollywood who decided to leave the church in secret, Haggis noted, “No one wants to feel foolish.” When he asked Remini how foolish she feels now that she’s out, she said, “I don’t feel foolish . . . I got into it as a child, and yes, I remained in it as an adult but again, I believed that we were doing good in the world.”

Haggis agreed with Remini’s assertion that, for the most part, “Scientologists are decent people.” And that only after many years did they realize that there was “something rotten,” as Remini put it. They recalled their growing unease with lying about the upper levels of the Scientology hierarchy and learning more and more about the secrets of the religion. What could have been a saccharine celebrity-on-celebrity ego boost turned out to be a bittersweet conversation between two people who once shared a belief structure in common.

The conversation concluded with some spontaneous questions from audience members hell-bent on making an impression on Remini. The first one, “Will you be in my movie?,” was quickly moved on from, but the rest ranged from “Is there really a secret Scientology jail?” (Haggis: “Yes, there is one”) to “What are your thoughts on social media for young women?” (Remini: “Stay off of it”).

At one point, Remini listed some of the duties required of higher lever Scientologists, including hours of daily therapy and studying.